Well, another article is out slamming VoIP – because our networks aren’t “ready” for it. I started reading it expecting to find gems of hidden knowledge on VoIP implementation pitfalls, but instead found another naysayer who is holding VoIP to higher standards than POTS.
The main thrust of the story is that VoIP can’t possibly be deployed yet, as the protocols used to provide for data network redundancy take between 30 seconds (Spanning Tree) to 3 minutes (BGP). Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a heck of a lot of redundancy in my “traditional” telephony setup. All of my circuits run on a cables out to the same pole and follow the same route to the telephone company CO. This situation leaves me one drunk-driver telephone crash away from some hefty downtime. I just only recently retired some tie-lines between my facilities that only had an uptime of about 80%. Furthermore – all of the analog cards on my current phone system only have one power supply to provide the essential 12V ringtone for all 12 phones on that card. We’ve replaced five of them this year – and the screwdriver-requiring fix takes much longer than three minutes! VoIP has the potential to overcome all of these problems with better redundancy and failover.
It’s time to stop listening to the naysayers and focus on the successes of VoIP rather than the shortcomings – we’ve been doing so with our ‘old’ phones for a long time.